What's new - Feb 1999

28 Feb 1999

A new addition to the species page is the Vidiians from Voyager. In addition, all the species menu buttons are now the narrow kind, which will speed up the section a little.

Personnel

Four new additions to the site today - new people pages for Hikaru Sulu, Beverly Crusher, Miles O'Brien, and B'Elanna Torres. All together with one or two images, as usual. Most of the information is cannon, but I've included some degree of speculation in the Sulu page because of the relative scarcity of facts for the TOS characters. The backstage dates are speculation from the Chronology, while Sulu being a champion fencer comes from one of the novels. His being the best combat pilot in the fleet is mentioned several times in novels.

17 Feb 1999

Section

Update

Spelling

All the weapons pages have now been through the spell checker.

Site Guide

The site guide has now been largely rewritten to bring it up to date.

Deep Space Nine Technical Manu

Several people have asked me why the site includes so little information from the DS9 technical manual. In response, I recently began to read through the specifications of ships given in the back of the book with a view to putting them up onto the site. The following problems came to light :

The Galaxy class is listed as having eleven phaser arrays and two torpedo tubes - the actual figures are twelve arrays and three tubes, according to the TNG TM and in the case of phasers verified by on-screen counts.

The Nebula and Excelsior classes have the exact same crew capacity, even though the Nebula is far larger in terms of its internal volume.

The Defiant entry lists it as having two torpedo tubes, when it actually has four, and makes no mention of the beam phasers which have been seen in action in "Shattered Mirror".

The Defiant entry lists the ship as having a top speed of Warp 9.982, which is contradicted by the episode "The Sound of Her Voice".

The Miranda class is stated as having two torpedo tubes, when visual inspection of the ship reveals that it has four.

The Saber and Norway classes have exactly the same dimensions even though they are clearly different sizes both on screen and in every known scale diagram, including those in the DS9 TM entry itself.

Both Bajoran vessels are stated as having phased polaron beam weapons. These are the high technology weapons that the Dominion uses, and should not be available to the Bajoran militia.

The Romulan shuttle is given an armament of six disruptors and two photon torpedo tubes, the same as the vastly larger D'Deridex class. Even assuming that the larger ships weapons are more powerful, this hardly seems credible.

Now while the fans are used to having to explain away the inconsistencies that inevitably creep into a franchise with the scale of the Trek one, it seems to me that this section is so riddled with inconsistencies that the whole thing must be considered as being unreliable. It seems clear that some entries have simply been copied from other ships, while the overall attention to even basic details seems to be quite poor.

Given this, I have a hard time convincing myself to include information from this source in the site. But equally, I'm reluctant to dismiss the entire book because of this. So, I'm just going to play it by ear - if I come across something useful in the DS9 TM seems to make sense and isn't contradicted elsewhere, I'll use it. Otherwise, I won't. All information from this source will be coloured green to indicate that it is a backstage source, rather than yellow for a canon source. I know this isn't a very satisfactory state of affairs - the last thing I want to do is set myself up as some sort of arbiter of what is and isn't to be accepted as real in the Trek universe! But I genuinely don't see any easier way out.

15 Feb 1999

Section

Update

Spelling

All the Specs pages on the "Other Ships" list have now been spell checked.

Species Pages

The Klingons have now been moved to the Beta Quadrant, as the Encyclopedia indicates that they are largely based there. The Human and Vulcan entries have been modified to indicate that the Vulcans were the first of the current powers to develop warp drive, rather than the Humans.

13 Feb 1999

Section

Update

Breen Page

The temperatures on the Breen page have been updated to reflect information from DS9 episode "Indiscretion".

10 Feb 1999

Section

Update

Transwarp

There's been some slight re-wording to the text in this entry. It's nothing very significant, it just reads a little bit more clearly in one or two places.

Battles

Now added is a description and scans from "Tears of the Prophets". There are a dozen pictures in all, chosen to represent a mini-storyboard for the Chintaka invasion. And no, I don't know if that's how you spell Chintaka! I really like these images - I picked them from over seven thousand frames. Yes, honestly!